The Clintons are political invertebrates. They really don't have any kind of spine. They're infinitely flexible, because really, it's all about power for them. They're not really rooted in any kind of ideology.

The Clintons are political invertebrates. They really don't have any kind of spine. They're infinitely flexible, because really, it's all about power for them. They're not really rooted in any kind of ideology.

Bill Clinton is the master politician. In one way, you can say that he was never really about self-enrichment - he was interested in power and self-aggrandizement. But Hillary was all about self-enrichment. She really did, I think, feel a sense of entitlement - she wanted money, she wanted power, she wanted prestige.

Clinton provided the final transition between decaying old-style liberalism and the new neoliberalism and neoconservatism - which are kind of incestuous first cousins. That goes for trade policy; for deregulation of major industries, from the utilities to communications companies to the banking industry to the insurance industry; all the way to continuing to wage war on Iraq. All of that is a living artifact of Clinton Time.

I look back at the Clinton administration as eight years of a fundamental transformation in the direction of the country - toward favoring big business, and toward almost frontal assaults on the most underprivileged members of the society. It was much more than cutting the social safety net. Clinton followed that by the abuse of those at the lowest rungs of our society - in ways that I don't think Bush, for all of his manifest faults, has done to the same degree.

Drone strikes, Albert Camus would argue, are not just meant to kill. They are programmed to terrorize. In this regard, whether the missile strikes its intended target or incinerates a goat-herder and his flock is incidental. In fact, the occasional killing of civilians may well be a desired outcome since collateral deaths intensify the fear. This is punishment by example, not for any particular crime or impending threat, but merely because of who you are, where you live, what you might believe. These new circuitries of death are meant to humiliate, subdue and dehumanize.

The Clinton administration opened the doors for Bush Junior in ways that Junior's father never did. Aside from the obvious Oedipal things going on with Bush Junior, his father hasn't been a big help to him. But Clinton certainly has. When Bush talks about his "other father," people are assuming that he's talking to the supreme deity. But I think that maybe it's Clinton who's on the speed dial.